Abstract: Bag of visual words (BoVW) models are widely utilized in image/ video representation and recognition. The cornerstone of these models is the encoding stage, in which local features are decomposed over a codebook in order to obtain a representation of features. In this paper, we propose a new encoding algorithm by jointly encoding the set of local descriptors of each sample and considering the locality structure of descriptors. The proposed method takes advantages of locality coding such as its stability and robustness to noise in descriptors, as well as the strengths of the group coding strategy by taking into account the potential relation among descriptors of a sample. To efficiently implement our proposed method, we consider the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework, which results in quadratic complexity in the problem size. The method is employed for a challenging classification problem: action recognition by depth cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art on the considered datasets.

Abstract: We present a methodology to automatically obtain Pose Space Deformation (PSD) basis for rigged garments through deep learning. Classical approaches rely on Physically Based Simulations (PBS) to animate clothes. These are general solutions that, given a sufficiently fine-grained discretization of space and time, can achieve highly realistic results. However, they are computationally expensive and any scene modification prompts the need of re-simulation. Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) with PSD offers a lightweight alternative to PBS, though, it needs huge volumes of data to learn proper PSD. We propose using deep learning, formulated as an implicit PBS, to unsupervisedly learn realistic cloth Pose Space Deformations in a constrained scenario: dressed humans. Furthermore, we show it is possible to train these models in an amount of time comparable to a PBS of a few sequences. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a neural simulator for cloth.
While deep-based approaches in the domain are becoming a trend, these are data-hungry models. Moreover, authors often propose complex formulations to better learn wrinkles from PBS data. Supervised learning leads to physically inconsistent predictions that require collision solving to be used. Also, dependency on PBS data limits the scalability of these solutions, while their formulation hinders its applicability and compatibility. By proposing an unsupervised methodology to learn PSD for LBS models (3D animation standard), we overcome both of these drawbacks. Results obtained show cloth-consistency in the animated garments and meaningful pose-dependant folds and wrinkles. Our solution is extremely efficient, handles multiple layers of cloth, allows unsupervised outfit resizing and can be easily applied to any custom 3D avatar.

Abstract: Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) is a successful technique in multi-class classification, which is a core problem in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. A major advantage of ECOC over other methods is that the multi- class problem is decoupled into a set of binary problems that are solved independently. However, literature defines a general error-correcting capability for ECOCs without analyzing how it distributes among classes, hindering a deeper analysis of pair-wise error-correction. To address these limitations this paper proposes an Error-Correcting Factorization (ECF) method, our contribution is three fold: (I) We propose a novel representation of the error-correction capability, called the design matrix, that enables us to build an ECOC on the basis of allocating correction to pairs of classes. (II) We derive the optimal code length of an ECOC using rank properties of the design matrix. (III) ECF is formulated as a discrete optimization problem, and a relaxed solution is found using an efficient constrained block coordinate descent approach. (IV) Enabled by the flexibility introduced with the design matrix we propose to allocate the error-correction on classes that are prone to confusion. Experimental results in several databases show that when allocating the error-correction to confusable classes ECF outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.